The Student Room Group

Nursing and Midwifery

I know nursing and midwifery are two different professions. But I cant decide which to do.
I don’t want to be a nurse working on a ward looking after people, I know if I do nursing Ill go off into a specialist area (I know there will be jobs that Im not even aware of yet), I love working clinically, and I love working directly with women (I am obviously capable of working with men too)
I am torn between the two because I like the opportunities an NMC pin can provide me with, like going into Health visiting, working in dermatology, and the family nurse partnership programme, plus many more.
Can anyone please give me more of an insight into the degrees? Does one provide more opportunities than the other?

Thanks In Advance
Reply 1
Original post by SEM007
I know nursing and midwifery are two different professions. But I cant decide which to do.
I don’t want to be a nurse working on a ward looking after people, I know if I do nursing Ill go off into a specialist area (I know there will be jobs that Im not even aware of yet), I love working clinically, and I love working directly with women (I am obviously capable of working with men too)
I am torn between the two because I like the opportunities an NMC pin can provide me with, like going into Health visiting, working in dermatology, and the family nurse partnership programme, plus many more.
Can anyone please give me more of an insight into the degrees? Does one provide more opportunities than the other?

Thanks In Advance


Yeah adult nursing has a vast amount of different areas you can work in and you can train in a particular specialist area if you chose to - you have outpatient department, a&e, maxillofacial, orthopaedics, renal, ent, oncology, transplant areas, general surgical wards, day surgery, and many many more areas you can choose from.

Adult nursing is mixture of both men and women.
Better also for promotion through the career ladder ( climbing the pay scale band's but you take on lots and lots of more responsibilities). Majority of adult nurses stick at band 5 due to the more harder responsibilities.


So midwifery - you are dealing solely with the woman's pregnancy, how the woman's body changes to cope with pregnancy, then the C-section if required, natural births, dealing with handling the woman's health situation while you are dealing with the birth.
There's a lot of stuff you have to learn more about women being pregnant and giving birth compared to adult nursing side


Unfortunately there's not many opportunities come along for promotion in midwifery as vast majority of staff are band 5 with the odd few being band 6 charge midwife, band 7 is senior charge midwife and band 7 midwife then it's ward sister above that. It's due to the limited numbers of midwives availability compared to the millions of adult nurses.

I would probably recommend adult nursing to you if you want to work in a vast range of nursing.

You can also work in the maternity wards as a adult nurse as you will assist in doing everything apart from delivering a baby.


A NHS registered midwife
Reply 2
Original post by SEM007
I know nursing and midwifery are two different professions. But I cant decide which to do.
I don’t want to be a nurse working on a ward looking after people, I know if I do nursing Ill go off into a specialist area (I know there will be jobs that Im not even aware of yet), I love working clinically, and I love working directly with women (I am obviously capable of working with men too)
I am torn between the two because I like the opportunities an NMC pin can provide me with, like going into Health visiting, working in dermatology, and the family nurse partnership programme, plus many more.
Can anyone please give me more of an insight into the degrees? Does one provide more opportunities than the other?
Thanks In Advance

Please note, there’s another option. You can convert to midwifery if you’re already a registered nurse, by taking a shortened course.

https://www.rcn.org.uk/Professional-Development/become-a-midwife#:~:text=The%20qualifications%20you'll%20need&text=If%20you're%20already%20a,to%20practise%20as%20a%20midwife.
Reply 3
Just to note that a lot of hospitals trusts/ boards and universities are no longer doing the conversion course degree as being phased out.


Under NMC rules for this is that they want every new student nursing staff to do the whole three years of there particularly nursing field.

Check out with your chosen universities if they are still offering the conversion degree course of around 20 months.
the employment opportunities that come with adult nursing and being an rn are so much more broad, so many specialities, whereas midwifery isn’t as broad

i’m a first year student midwife and i was on the fence about which i wanted to go for.. the thing that made me lean towards midwifery was the fact that 2300 placement hours is alot and i wanted to feel genuinely passionate about the role, midwifery called to me more than nursing

that being said i sometimes wish i went for nursing because of the specialization routes you can take, it’s alot more flexible

it honestly depends on you and what you want to do in the future x

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